as we eat our cornflakes in a silence

as loud as a slamming door

and footsteps going downstairs

on which later I take a “fall,”

to get rid of her,

but only succeed in scaring myself

into this reluctant motherhood.

After we finish, I finally croak a few words,

as if I haven’t spoken for a long time.

“Dicks don’t have no conscience,” I tell her

and she gives me a looks that asks,

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean,” I pause, thinking it should be clear.

“Mom, I’m just taking out the garbage,” she says,

as I put away the past

like a wedding dress.

GREETINGS FRIEND

Choctaw, Cherokee . . .

It was all the same to me

when I was ten.

All I knew was we were Indian,

part anyway.

I couldn’t tell by looking at myself.

I just saw a mouth with front teeth missing.

I always wore a red velvet shirt like a Navajo

a cowboy belt, jeans, cowboy boots

and my hair in pigtails.

When I went outside to play,

I’d whoop and holler

and pretend I was a warrior

defending my people,

until my mother called me

and my Siamese to dinner.

He ate beside the table

on the floor, of course.

Afterward, I’d go outside again

and look at my horse, Queenie.

I didn’t ride because I was scared to,

but I gave her sugar,

then I stood on a stool

and scratched her head above the white star.

Sometimes she whinnied and galloped over

when she saw me.

Other times, she just ran away

as if she didn’t want to be bothered

by little girls that day.

She was like my great-grandfather, John.

He lived with my great-aunt

and spent his time sitting in his room.

Once I asked him what he was doing

and he said, “Chewing on the past.”

“How does it taste?” I asked.

He said, “Like sawdust,”

then he didn’t say anything else.

He mostly kept to himself,

a cigar box of deeds in his lap.

I mean ashes,

because he didn’t own the land anymore.

A few years before,

somebody burned down his house in Oklahoma

after he found oil.

He said he knew who’d had a hand in it,

but he was too old to fight them

and asked my great-aunt to move

him and my great-grandmother, Maggie,

to Tucson, Arizona,

which is where I was

and where he sat, a can of tobacco spit

at his feet,

the smell of it and the musty odor of old people

mixed in with something else

so suffocating I used to have to run outside

and take deep breaths

if I stayed too long.

He’d always say, “Go on and play.

I’m tired today,”

but one time, he called me back.

He said, “I got something for you,”

and he gave me a photo of an Indian man.

He said, “that’s my brother.